Tommy Lee Jones’s terrifically confident frontier western has inspired a variety of responses since its first appearance at festivals earlier this year. It has been suspected of misogyny – and then defended as feminist. Neither is quite accurate, although ideological responses have probably been amplified by critical shock at a certain late-breaking narrative development. The performances are great. Director Jones also stars as George Briggs, and awards himself plenty of closeups and big scenes. Briggs is a boozy, ornery old devil in mid-19th-century Nebraska. He fatefully encounters Mary Bee Cuddy: a respectable, courageous and heartbreakingly lonely unmarried woman superbly played by Hilary Swank. Like the decent woman that she is, Mary Bee has volunteered for the grim job of caring for three women who have suffered nervous breakdowns through the desolate hardship of their frontier lives, and she must now escort them back East to Ohio, chained up like prisoners in a wagon: a metaphor on wheels for the depression and madness that is all about. She chivvies reprobate Briggs into helping her in this journey, and by and by, their tense relationship begins to thaw. All this is, of course, not so far from True Grit, or classics such as Stagecoach or 3:10 to Yuma, or indeed Jones’s own much-admired previous directorial venture, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.The Homesman is based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout, whose The Shootist was filmed in 1976, with John Wayne in his final role.) It is a muscular, heartfelt picture, tempered with shrewd sympathy and insight.

• Tommy Lee Jones on The Homesman: ‘It’s a consideration of American imperialism’